That’s because he hasn’t said or done anything newsworthy, right?
Wrong. What’s newsworthy is my second reason for thanking him.

First covered at NewsBusters
yesterday by Noel Sheppard,
and described this evening in an
Investors Business Daily editorial,
Mr. Edenhofer has proffered the principal motivation behind the
"climate change movement" - redistribution of wealth:

A high-ranking member of
the U.N.’s Panel on Climate Change admits the group’s primary
goal is the redistribution of wealth and not environmental
protection or saving the Earth.

Money, they say, is the root of all evil. It’s also the
motivating force behind what is left of the climate change
movement after the devastating Climategate and IPCC scandals
that saw the deliberate manipulation of scientific data to spur
the world into taking draconian regulatory action.

Left for dead, global warm-mongers are busy planning their next
move, which should occur at a climate conference in relatively
balmy Cancun at month’s end. Certainly it should provide a more
appropriate venue for discussing global warming than the site of
the last failed climate conference - chilly Copenhagen.

Ottmar Edenhofer… told the Neue Zurcher Zeitung last
week:

"The climate summit in Cancun at
the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of
the largest economic conferences since the Second World
War."

After all, redistributing global
wealth is no small matter.

Edenhofer let the environmental cat out of the bag when he said,

"climate policy is
redistributing the world’s wealth" and that "it’s a big
mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major
themes of globalization."

…Edenhofer claims "developed countries have basically
expropriated the atmosphere of the world community" and so
they must have their wealth expropriated and redistributed
to the victims of their alleged crimes, the postage stamp
countries of the world.

He admits this "has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore,
with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."

It has everything to do with a
different kind of green.

…Given this administration’s
willingness to compromise American sovereignty, we could
soon see Americans taxed to fund a
global scam - the ultimate
form of taxation without representation.

So science has been abused as a vehicle
for justifying worldwide wealth redistribution.

Gosh, that’s what many of us have been
saying for years. That’s what the
Climategate e-mails clearly
demonstrated. It’s nice to see that Mr. Edenhofer from his position
of influence at the IPCC agrees, and I thank him for his frankness.

Those who wish to brush up on their German can go to the original
NZZ interview
here. Google’s English translation
of the article is
here.

The money quote, as translated, is,

"But one must say clearly that we
distribute by climate policy de facto the world’s wealth."

Regardless of whether they do anything
with the story, it must not be easy being green at the news outlets
mentioned in the second paragraph of this post, or anywhere else in
the establishment press where they’ve been swallowing the
human-caused global warning propaganda all these years.

It shouldn’t be easy being a green
collaborator either; someone should ask GE’s Jeff Inmelt what
he makes of Edenhofer’s remark. In the pre-New Media days, all of
these folks could have gotten away with ignoring mistakes like
Edenhofer’s.

Now they all just look like fools, as
they watch their credibility continue to sink into the
not-rising ocean.

Ottmar Edenhofer
was appointed as joint chair of Working Group 3 at the
Twenty-Ninth Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The deputy director
and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate
Impact Research (PIK) and Professor of the Economics of
Climate Change at the Berlin Institute of Technology
will be co-chairing the Working Group "Mitigation of
Climate Change" with Ramón Pichs Madruga from Cuba and
Youba Sokona from Mali.

Climate policy has almost
nothing to do anymore

with environmental protection,

says the German economist and
IPCC official

Ottmar Edenhofer.

The next world climate summit
in Cancun

is actually an economy summit
during which

the distribution of the world’s
resources will be negotiated.

Ottmar Edenhofer

Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental
protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar
Edenhofer.

The next world climate summit in Cancun
is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the
world's resources will be negotiated.

Mr. Edenhofer, everybody concerned with
climate protection demands emissions reductions. You now speak
of "dangerous emissions reduction." What do you mean?
Ottmar Edenhofer:

So far economic growth has gone hand
in hand with the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

One percent growth means one percent
more emissions. The historic memory of mankind remembers: In
order to get rich one has to burn coal, oil or gas.

And therefore, the emerging
economies fear CO2 emission limits.

But everybody should take part in
climate protection, otherwise it does not work.
That is so easy to say.

But particularly the industrialized
countries have a system that relies almost exclusively on fossil
fuels. There is no historical precedent and no region in the
world that has decoupled its economic growth from emissions.

Thus, you cannot expect that India or China will regard CO2
emissions reduction as a great idea. And it gets worse: We are
in the midst of a renaissance of coal, because oil and gas (sic)
have become more expensive, but coal has not.

The emerging
markets are building their cities and power plants for the next
70 years, as if there would be permanently no high CO2 price.

The new thing about your proposal
for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development
policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when
they hear development policies.
That will change immediately if global emission rights are
distributed.

If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa
will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow
there. This will have enormous implications for development
policy.

And it will raise the question if these countries can
deal responsibly with so much money at all.

That does not sound anymore like
the climate policy that we know.
Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy
separately from the major themes of globalization.

The climate
summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate
conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since
the Second World War.

Why?

Because we have 11,000 gigatons of
carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet - and we
must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep
the 2-degree target, 11 000 to 400 - there is no getting around
the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the
soil.

De facto, this means an
expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This
leads to a very different development from that which has been
triggered by development policy.
First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated
the atmosphere of the world community.

But one must say clearly
that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate
policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be
enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the
illusion that international climate policy is environmental
policy.

This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy
anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

Nevertheless, the environment is
suffering from climate change - especially in the global south.
It will be a lot to do with adaptation.

But that just goes far
beyond traditional development policy: We will see in Africa
with climate change a decline in agricultural yields. But this
can be avoided if the efficiency of production is increased -
and especially if the African agricultural trade is embedded in
the global economy.

But for that we need to see that successful
climate policy requires other global trade and financial
policies.

The great misunderstanding of the
UN summit in Rio in 1992 is repeated in the climate policy: the
developed countries talk about environment, the developing
countries about development.
It is even more complicated. In the 1980s, our local
environmental problems were luxury problems for the developing
countries.

If you already fed and own a car, you can get
concerned about acid rain. For China, the problem was how to get
600 million Chinese people in the middle class.

Whether there
was a coal power plant or whether the labour standards in the
coal mines were low was second priority - as it was here in the
19th Century.

But the world has become smaller.
Now something new happens: it is no longer just our luxury, our
environment.

Developing countries have realized that causes of
climate change lie in the north and the consequences in the
south. And in developed countries, we have realized that for a
climate protection target of two degrees neither purely
technical solutions nor life style change will be sufficient.

The people here in Europe have the grotesque idea that shopping
in the bio food store or electric cars will solve the problem.

This is arrogant because the ecological footprint of our
lifestyle has increased in the last 30 years, despite the
eco-movement.

You say that for successful climate
policy a high degree of international cooperation is necessary.
However this cooperation is not present.
I share the skepticism.

But do we have an alternative?
Currently, there are three ideas how to avoid the difficult
cooperation:

we try unsafe experiments such as geo-engineering

focus on the development of clean and safe energy

one trusts
in regional and local solutions

However, there is no indication
that any of these ideas solves the problem. We must want the
cooperation, just as you work together for the regulation of
financial markets.

But unlike the financial crisis, in
climate policy a country benefits if it does not join in.
The financial crisis was an emergency operation - in the face of
danger we behave more cooperatively.

Such a thing will not
happen in climate policy, because it will always remain
questionable whether a specific event like a flood is a climate
phenomenon. But there is always the risk that individual
rationality leads to collective stupidity.

Therefore, one cannot
solve the climate problem alone, but it has to be linked to
other problems.

There must be penalties and incentives: global
CO2-tariffs and technology transfer.

In your new book you talk much
about ethics. Do ethics play a role in climate negotiations?
Ethics always play a role when it comes to power.

China and
Latin America, for example, always emphasize the historical
responsibility of developed countries for climate change. This
responsibility is not to deny, but it is also a strategic
argument for these countries. I would accept the responsibility
for the period since 1995 because we know since then, what is
causing the greenhouse effect.

To extend the responsibility to
the industrial revolution is not ethically justified.

Could we the ethics in order to
break the gridlock?
The book contains a parable:

A group of hikers, who represent
the world community, walks through a desert.

The industrialized
nations drink half of the water and then say generously:

"Let us
share the rest."

The others reply:

"This is not possible; you
have already drunk half of the water. Let us talk first about
your historical responsibility."

I think if we are arguing about
the water supply because we cannot agree on the ethical
principles, then we will die of thirst. What we need to look for
is an oasis that is the non-carbon global economy.